This is a really nice book outlining some important Web performance keys. The only downside is that by being almost three years old, it’s already dated. But some of the core concepts are not going to change because they are key to having a web page display and work properly.
The book focuses entirely on client side issues – how to make your JavaScript run faster, ways to more efficiently crush images and how to make your page load faster which makes your users happier - to name a few topics covered. What I really liked about the book is how the author created tests to measure his suggestions and show the differences in speed between different methods. All too often people doing performance work assume that their changes will improve things without verifying that they make a difference. You can also see why those changes affect the speed by looking at the load patterns using a tool like FireBug on FireFox.
Steve Souders even goes into detail on which CSS selectors you want to avoid because they slow things down and how you can speed those up. Some of the changes he suggests are more useful for high-volume websites like AOL and Bing, but even those of us with sites seeing considerably less traffic can use some of his suggestions. And don’t we all hope to run such a site some day?
To top it off, he has a nice list of tools in an Appendix for those of us looking for more tools to help us with our jobs.
In all, a book well worth reading.